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The differences between Chinese and Western cultures
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To best understand Maxine Hong Kingston’s article “Tongue-Tied, one must consider the very definition of the term “tongue-tied. The Oxford dictionary defines tongue-tied as “being speechless or confused in expression, as from shyness, embarrassment or astonishment.”(Dictionary.com) This definition explains the discomfort of the little girl’s feelings throughout this article. Maxine Hong Kingston lived in America, far away from her Chinese culture and traditions. She struggled to find the best balance between learning to speak English, and adapting to the American culture while also keeping her own Chinese culture’s values and traditions. The feelings of pressure and anxiety play a major role in second language acquisition. Her anxiety …show more content…
The story tells that the girl did not speak for three years in school. During the three years, she covered her school art paintings with black paint. She painted black over houses and flowers and suns and she made a layer of chalk on top when she drew on the blackboard. This black paint shows the symbolism of wanting to cover up and hide herself from the challenges of her new life. The artwork represented her inner self and the black the covering she felt was necessary in her current world. Note that the blindness and the darkness were like the artwork she drew (her true self) and painted over each with black paint. She imagined pulling the curtain or opening the door to what was beneath. Kingston described fear feeling and strong emotions through the painting. It was deep, dark and helpfulness. To the Americans at school who only saw the black, she was being stubborn, depressed, psychotic maybe, or developmentally challenged. Moreover, in the American school, she did not know that she was supposed to talk. When she realised that she had to talk in school to pass kindergarten she became more miserable. Reading out loud was easier because she didn’t have to make up the words. Simple words like “I” were hard because in Chinese “I” had seven strokes but only 3 strokes in English. It was a hard concept to understand. She was punished for not saying them right which added to her insecurities. The girl liked the Negro students because they treated her well and thought she spoke well. They protected her from mean Japanese kids who hit her and chased her and called her
“Standard English was imposed on children of immigrant parents, then the children were separated from native English speakers, then the children were labeled “inferior” and “ignorant” (Hughes 70) because they could not speak Standard English. In addition to feeling inferior about their second language skills, these students also felt inadequate in regard to speaking their own mother tongues” (qtd in Kanae)
Imagine feeling and looking different from all those around you. Imagine if you weren’t understood the same way as the majority. In the book “American Born Chinese”, two characters, Jin and Monkey King who went through the same situations, but in different societies. The Monkey King insight into the impact of society on Jin as they both face social exclusion through experiencing internalized racism. Further as Monkey King transforms into another character, Chin-Kee, which Jin sees as an embarrassing Chinese culture.
An Asian-American writer growing up in a tight and traditional Chinese community in California, Kingston is placed by her background and time period to be at the unique nexus of an aged, stale social institution and a youthful, boisterous one. She has had to face life as an alien to the culture of the land she grew up in, as well as a last witness of some scattered and unspeakably tragic old ideals. She saw the sufferings and has suffered herself; but instead of living life demurely in the dark corner of the family room like she was expected to, Kingston became the first woman warrior to voice the plight of the mute females in both Chinese and American societies. The seemingly immeasurable and indeed unconquerable gap between the two fundamentally divided cultures comes together in herself and her largely autobiographical work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
With her mother, she uses “broken” English. With her colleagues, she uses correct English grammar. Similarly, Wong also grew up in America with a traditional Chinese mother. In contrast, Wong’s upbringing involves her mother forcing her into attending two different schools. After her American school day, Wong continued on with Chinese school to learn about both cultures.
...in her essay “No Name Woman”. The Chinese tradition of story telling is kept by Kingston in her books. Becoming Americanized allowed these women the freedom to show their rebellious side and make their own choices. Rebelling against the ideals of their culture but at the same time preserving some of the heritage they grew up with. Both woman overcame many obstacles and broke free of old cultural ways which allowed them an identity in a new culture. But most importantly they were able to find identity while preserving cultural heritage.
Murphy expresses how justifying bad deeds for good is cruel by first stirring the reader’s emotions on the topic of bullying with pathos. In “White Lies,” Murphy shares a childhood memory that takes the readers into a pitiful classroom setting with Arpi, a Lebanese girl, and the arrival of Connie, the new girl. Murphy describes how Arpi was teased about how she spoke and her name “a Lebanese girl who pronounced ask as ax...had a name that sounded too close to Alpo, a brand of dog food...” (382). For Connie, being albino made her different and alone from everyone else around her “Connie was albino, exceptionally white even by the ultra-Caucasian standards... Connie by comparison, was alone in her difference” (382). Murphy tries to get the readers to relate and pity the girls, who were bullied for being different. The author also stirs the readers to dislike the bullies and their fifth grade teacher. Murphy shares a few of the hurtful comments Connie faced such as “Casper, chalk face, Q-Tip... What’d ya do take a bath in bleach? Who’s your boyfriend-Frosty the Snowman?” (382). Reading the cruel words can immediately help one to remember a personal memory of a hurtful comment said to them and conclude a negative opinion of the bullies. The same goes for the fifth grade teac...
Amy Tan a Chinese American writer describes in her essay her mothers struggles due to the limitation of her English. Peoples perception of her is as if she has lower intelligence because of her “broken” language. Tan also mentions that in her early life her mothers way of speaking limited her opinion of her. She points out the fact that because she liked a challenge she didn’t follow the typical Asian-American stereotype and became a writer instead. In “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan talks about her mothers difficulties in the modern day USA due to her imperfection in English.
Kingston’s belief is that Chinese beliefs and attitudes prohibit her family from being more understanding of her aunt's actions. “The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” (Kingston 49). Kingston is suggesting that if her family developed a more liberal, or more American, perspective of her aunt’s actions then they might be more understanding of the situation. “The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her.” (Kingston 48). Although Kingston's approach to her article is more imaginary, her article demonstrates remarkable similarities to that of
Language can defined the type of person you become and it has an influence on our choices as well as lifestyle. Language itself has become a way of seeing life in a different perspectives. Tan discusses the many ways in which language has played a role in her life and the result from it. I can relate to Tan’s experience to some extent because I come from a bilingual household too. Just like Tan, I am one of my mother’s main source of communication with people who don’t speak spanish. I believe the notion of Tan’s “Mother Tongue” is stating that just because someone who cannot speak the English language perfectly, is considered less intelligent to many compared to those who can understand and speaks it fluently. But what makes us all unique is that it is rare to find two or more people who speak the same exact English. Even though both Tan and I helped our parent and come from different ethnic backgrounds; Tan came from a Chinese family while I came from a Hispanic family. We both share similar ideas about the language spoken in our household, and it was also a big challenge for both of us while we were being raised by an immigrant parent who spoke only “limited English”(Tan
The problem started with her mother because she spoke broken English. She had a hard time during her life when she moved to the US because she couldn’t speak English well. The first reason was mixed the English with Chinese, and they used code. The family didn’t practice the language. On one day Amy Tan 's mother exposed to a lot of attitude and that’s bothering her because when she spoke to the native speaker some people understood 50% and the other did not understand her. Since she wants to order something they didn’t give her a nice service, or tried to ignore her, but Amy Tan always tried to fix the problem for her mother because she can speak the English clearly. Amy Tan 's mother felt depressing and Her daughter decided to make her mother glad, so she made a huge deal for her mother because she made her mother tried to speak English by explaining the English words to Chinese, and that’s made the English for her mother more easily just to be in touched with the American people. Even Amy Tan 's mother was struggling with English, but she plain in her life goal that’s mean nothing impossible to do it, and everything from learning could be possible. If anyone would something they
The scene is always the same: the three of us sitting in a room together, talking. I see her from the corner of my eye, glancing for only a second or two, but always long enough to notice the look on her face, the expression I’ve become so painfully familiar with over the years. I am forced to turn away; the conversation resumes. She is a few feet from us. She hears everything, and understands nothing except what she can gather from the expressions on our faces, the tone of our voices. She pretends not to be bothered, smiling at us and interjecting random questions or comments in Chinese—a language I was raised to speak, a language I’ve slowly forgotten over the years, a language that is now mine only by blood. It is an earnest but usually futile attempt to break through the invisible barrier that separates her from us, and in spite of all her efforts to hide it, that sad, contem...
In Maya Angelou’s Champion of the World and Amy Tan’s Fish Cheeks both convey their struggles with identity. Both authors are from minority cultures, and describe the same harsh pressures from the dominant culture. They share situations of being outcasts, coming from different racial backgrounds and trying to triumph over these obstacles. Tan and Angelou speak about the differences between their childhood selves and white Americans. Tan talks about the anxiety of a teenage girl who feels embarrassed about her Chinese culture, and who wants to fit in with American society. Angelou’s explains the racial tension and hostility between African and white Americans.
In Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical piece “Silence”, she describes her inability to speak English when she was in grade school. Kindergarten was the birthplace of her silence because she was a Chinese girl attending an American school. She was very embarrassed of her inability, and when moments came up where she had to speak, “self-disgust” filled her day because of that squeaky voice she possessed (422). Kingston notes that she never talked to anyone at school for her first year of silence, except for one or two other Chinese kids in her class. Maxine’s sister, who was even worse than she was, stayed almost completely silent for three years. Both went to the same school and were in the same second grade class because Maxine had flunked kindergarten.
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
Amy Tan is the author of the essay Mother Tongue. In this essay, she explains how the power of language has influenced her life through her mother and the experiences they have had together concerning her mother's English-speaking ability, or lack there of. She was born into a Chinese family where both Chinese and English were spoken. She is sensitive to and accepting of people's lingual differences. She talks about how the inability to speak English well in America gives others the wrong impression: "...everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker" (Tan 13). She is saying here that prolific English speakers place limitations on people who have limited English-speak...